If you had ten Canadian dollars...

1. Ten dollars at the discount grocery store buys three bananas, a package of tortillas, a package of peppers, and two small bottles of pop to share. (What's for supper? Fajitas made with leftover chicken, along with reheated rice and a can of beans.)

2. Ten dollars buys two DQ cones. Not happenin' here. Well, maybe sometime in the summer.

3. Ten dollars buys three cash bus rides. (Tickets are cheaper.)

4. Ten dollars buys a package of ten razor blades, or a three-pack of socks.

5. Ten dollars at the thrift store buys a scarf, a 75% off cotton cardigan, and some books.

How do you spend ten dollars?

Shopping fun with Mama Squirrel

It was time for one of those not-often walking trips uptown. Actually I didn't have to walk there this time, because Mr. Fixit was having lunch with a friend and dropped me off near the stores.

At the bookstore: calendars for half price (we were using a freebie in the kitchen, and I thought sea turtles were nicer than photos of recipes we won't make), and the November/December issue of Faith Today. I was hoping for the Jan/Feb issue, but it's not in the store yet.

At the consignment store: two things I was especially looking for, and that I hadn't been able to find at the thrift store. First, a knitted vest.

And then a grey cardigan. I tried on about ten different ones before settling on this wrap style. (I was feeling very picky, and the others were all too dark, too light, too small, too fuzzy, or too overpriced.)

I stopped at the grocery store and picked up emergency lettuce for Muffin, and some half-priced onion-poppyseed buns. That store always has the best clearance baking.

Mr. Fixit picked me up at the library, where I found a for-sale book about cooking like a cheap mid-century Francophone.

Which made me hungry enough that I came home and ate one of the buns with cream cheese. Bon appetit.

In the week when Christmas comes: Tuesday

Let every hall have boughs of green,

With berries glowing in between,

     In the week when Christmas comes.

~~ from "In the Week When Christmas Comes," by Eleanor Farjeon

Mr. Fixit and I went to Giant Tiger this morning. For anyone who doesn't know, that's a Canadian discount store chain which, as I usually put it, is where you buy flip-flops. But they have groceries too, and we needed to get a few basics. Strangely enough, it's also where we find our favourite brand of frozen cabbage rolls (doesn't everyone want cabbage rolls on Christmas?). And we found a small frozen cheesecake, someone else's Christmas request...stay with me here...and we replenished the lettuce for the guinea pig, and picked up some juice and canned goods and organic rice crisp things (for company). And a small cheap floor mat for the garage, because Giant Tiger is where you find small cheap floor mats for the garage. We came out with several full bags, and feeling happy enough about it all.

We made a stop at the bank, and then dropped into a large-but-upscale chain grocery store next door, because Mr. Fixit has sometimes found holiday meat items there, and he thought it was worth having a look. If Giant Tiger is a bit, excuse the expression, lower on the food chain than the store where we usually shop (like, Walmart), this place was a few notches above. What's the difference, besides the prices? I don't know...maybe it was the huge amount of expensive chocolates and party food in your face everywhere you turned. Or the smell of the lilies in the floral department as you went out the door. Definitely a change from the discount store.

The fancy store didn't have what we were looking for, but it was no big deal, we'll find something. I was more struck by the every-day-ness of the discount store vs. the as-classy-as-a-big-city atmosphere of the other one. That kind of "classy" is a bit too demanding for me...I imagine that food (and the lilies) all standing in spotlights like movie stars, bowing and waiting for the proper amount of applause. I think I prefer every-day-ness, even at Christmas. 

What do you eat at Easter? (updated)

The local supermarket ads always feature any ethnic feast or holiday that's going on. When it's not your own tradition, the reasons for the specific foods they're featuring are quite mysterious. Why does this or that Indian festival require this or that vegetable, or that dessert? What are they going to make with those big sacks of rice and flour that are on sale?

So with that in mind, I find the Easter-week ads amusing. What do non-Easter-celebrating people make of the fact that cream cheese is almost always featured, along with eggs? I'm not even sure what we're meant to do with that: cream cheese icing for carrot cake? Cheese cake? Cheese balls?

There are frozen vegetables, fruit pies, vanilla ice cream, cases of pop, cake mix, Pillsbury rolls on sale. Stuffing mix and spices. Clamato juice (I don't think I have ever had that, not even once). Ham, lamb, and turkeys. Pots of spring flowers. Bacon, I suppose to eat with the eggs or pancakes at your Easter Brunch.

Well, anyway, here's our extended-family menu for Sunday dinner this year.

Turkey if we can find one, or ham if we can't
Sweet potato salad from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home
Carol Flinders' Tofu-Almond Lasagna
Salad that my sister-in-law is bringing
Raw veggie plate
Kiffle (jam-filled Easter rolls, but we're using this roll dough this year)

Fruit pizza (white vegan cake baked in a pizza pan, with strawberry jam sauce and fresh fruit on top)
Maybe another dessert from my sister-in-law
Maybe some other fresh fruit or candies if we have some.

Something to drink.

Besides the family dinner, we have a "Paska Party" at church before the service on Easter morning, which means, mostly, coffee and sweet breads, or whatever people want to bring. I am probably going to take cream cheese mints (the gf people at church like them, and I had already bought some of that mysterious cream cheese on sale) and some of our kiffle. For Friday we don't usually buy hot cross buns since nobody except me likes those weird bits of peel and stuff in them, but I did make Carrot Spice Cupcakes (updated link 2023) (more like muffins) for a treat.

(The Apprentice wanted to know why the texture of the muffins was lighter than most of our muffins. It's sort of a hybrid recipe, halfway between cake and muffin batter, with two eggs. Also, I used one cup whole wheat flour and the rest ground-up rolled oats. I have made them with just ground-up oats, too. The recipe calls for coconut, nuts, and raisins in addition to carrots, but I left those out; and I changed the spices a bit, left out the ginger but added a bit of cloves and allspice.)

Euro Foods (photo post)

Every so often we go on a splurge at Euro Foods, and then have a sort of indoor picnic over the weekend.

Rolled oats. I don't usually buy them at Euro Foods, but I needed some and we were there anyway.

Frozen perogies

Noodles, spice cookies, feta cheese, fruit pastries

Sesame snaps, fruit juice

Tea for Mr. Fixit

Chocolate milk

Rolls and cold cuts (not pictured: meat for the freezer).

Frozen and the chosen?

Frozen and the chosen?  I had never heard that phrase before today, and would have guessed that it had something to do with Canadian winters.  However, no, it refers to the beliefs of certain food trendoids that we should only eat fresh, so frozen isn't for the chosen.  And, apparently, that includes putting extra food in your own freezer.

For me, that falls in there with parents who list "rules I never thought I'd have to make."  I never thought anyone would have to say "put the leftovers in the freezer." Or that people wouldn't think you could buy or bake extra bread, on purpose, so that you could freeze the extra. Or, maybe the problem is that they're asking whether you should.

Like the Prairie-based author of the editorial that inspired this early-morning Mama Squirrel rant, it's the waste that irks me.  It seems to be strictly a first-world "problem" that we buy or cook so much food that we don't know what to do with it, or that whatever's there doesn't suit our mood today, so it doesn't get eaten.  Anywhere else, any time in history, whatever was around would  have gone in the stew pot. End of story.

All I know is that (and not meaning to boast about it), our stand-alone freezer and fridge-top compartment, while not stocked for famine, do currently hold an extra loaf of pumpkin bread, several containers of vegetarian chili and bean soup, bread from the store, chicken, a few bags of vegetables, and a container of leftover rice. I often have extra tomato sauce or cookies or bananas in there too. Call it food purgatory, but not a place of eternal punishment.

It's just what we do.

Doesn't everybody?

Frugal Finds and Fixes: Don't Get Discouraged Edition

In spite of our hosting the Festival of Frugality,  it has not been our most successful week, moneywise.  Some of that has to do with extreme winter weather, some doesn't.  We had to throw out a bunch of apples that had gone bad. We had large power and water bills to pay, we went out for burgers on the weekend, and (due to bad driving conditions) we ended up getting several days' worth of food at the Euro grocery, which is a fun place to shop but not the cheapest, especially when you need things like ketchup and have to pay extra for imported brands.

It's also a bad place for us to go when our impulse-buying resistance is running low.  (Can you say chocolate?)

Well, what did go well this week?

Somebody mentioned another free-or-cheap-ebook-finder, BookBub. You sign up, specify your interests and reader format, and they send you daily updates.  I downloaded a free cookbook.

Dollygirl sewed a pink-striped bathing suit/undies set for her Kit doll. 

I ordered some discount books from Hampstead House Books, and got further discounts by using a credit note (from a previous order) and by filling out a survey.

Dollygirl found two nice sweaters on clearance at Walmart.

I cleaned out a couple of shelves and boxes, which translated into some unused paper, folders, index cards, and other "found stuff" to add to our office-supply stash.

I baked cookies, pumpkin bars, and muffins.  I tried to stick to meals that are cheaper overall for us, such as a Sloppy Joe recipe that calls for only tomato paste and spices in addition to ground meat.  It would be even cheaper with beans added, but the Squirrels like their Sloppies straight-up.

I hung several loads of washing on the furnace-room clotheslines, instead of using the dryer.  I have gotten out of the hanging-up habit lately, especially when Mr. Fixit is working in there and doesn't need to be fighting his way through everybody's shirts and socks; but the dryer is expensive, especially when we're getting hit with time-of-use charges. (Not everybody wants to do their laundry late at night.)

Mr. Fixit found some good radio stuff to restore and sell.

I got a free expanded-translation New Testament from a church library discard pile.

Dollygirl and I played some fun free online math games.  She particularly liked the pirate game where the "teacher" walks the plank--and the more questions you get right, the closer he/she gets to the end.

I guess it wasn't that bad a week, when you think about it.

Time Saving, Space Saving

The Common Room has a post full of time-and-space-saving household tips, and wants to know what ours are.

All right, in no particular order:

1.  Have a few meal-saving and/or leftover-using standbys either in the cupboard, in the freezer, or in your head.  The ones in the cupboard or the freezer might include anything from a frozen whole casserole to some precooked rice or pre-grated cheese; and the ones in your head would be anything that quickly stretches, fills out, gussies up, or finishes off a meal without your having to run to the store.  Joyce Radway might have depended on caramel junket, but I personally prefer chocolate or vanilla microwave cake if I need dessert, or the bottom half of a dessert, in fifteen minutes.  Tightwad Gazette lemonade is another auto-pilot recipe that fills in when we want a drink that's fancier than water but don't have any juice around:  1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 cup bottled lemon juice, 4 cups water.  (You can easily make more, just keep the same proportions.)  Of course nobody needs lemonade or cake; but sometimes a meal needs a little cheering up.

2.  Invite Lillian Gilbreth to your house to do a time-and-motion study of your storage and home routines.  Failing that, have a hard look at things yourself, and change things around even if you've been doing it the same way or putting stuff in the same place for fifteen years.  This summer I did some mega-cleanouts and changed some things around...yes, in some spots, after fifteen years.  One example:  we have only shelf in our kitchen that's tall enough for cereal boxes.  Over the past few years, the shelf gradually got taken over with tall cookbooks and kitchen binders, to the point that we kept having to drag the cereal boxes up and down from the basement cold room, or leave them out in the tiny recycling area by the porch door.  So, duh...this summer I cleaned out a deep drawer that used to hold our biggest slow cooker (before it died prematurely), and put the cookbooks into the drawer.  Now the cereal can live back in the kitchen again.

I also cleaned out a vintage kitchen cupboard in the cold room...I mean, really cleaned it out, with soap and water and all that...got rid of some vintage stuff in it like a sausage stuffer (really), along with some vintage crumbs and dust...and found that there actually was room in there to organize some previously un-organizable stuff.  Now we have what amounts to a "holiday/party cupboard," because the top part is holding things like our ice-cream maker and popcorn, the surface down below has a basket with paper plates and other picnic stuff, one of the drawers has picnic-table cloths and clamps (the other drawer has canning supplies), and the cupboards on the bottom have things like turkey pans and cake plates.

And I finally got around to safety-pinning all the pairs of mittens and gloves together, in one bin.  Think that's what King Lemuel meant by "when it snows, she has no fear for her household?"

3.  Have a spouse or kid or buddy who likes to grocery shop with you.  After this many years, I just have to laugh sometimes about the ruts Mr. Fixit and I get into, but you know what, sometimes the ruts are GOOD.  I don't have to worry about picking up vitamins or fruit or tuna or bread or laundry soap: those are part of his mental list.  He doesn't have to remember to get milk or vegetables or flour or toilet paper or coffee or...okay, you get the idea, those are mine.  We meet at the end, double-check on anything unusual we needed, and that's it.

4.  Laugh when you can.  At Mr. Fixit's birthday this month, we were out of appropriate wrapping paper; even the tissue paper was gone.  We all came up with different no-cost solutions.  I stuck magazine pictures on a packing-paper package.  Dewey Squirrel gave him a present wrapped in a Christmas gift bag and topped with a (yard-saled) sympathy card.  The Squirrelings also came up with creative wrapping ideas.

5.  One space-saving idea:  we usually like lower-tech solutions for things, but there's one development in technology we do like:  boxed DVD sets for TV programs (goes without saying that we like them even better when we can get them used or cheap).  Of course for people who watch everything on the computer anyway, it doesn't matter. But if you've been trying to store, say, VHS copies of Mission Impossible or Star Trek or Fraggle Rock or whatever, where you get about two episodes to a tape, DVD sets are a huge improvement.  Could we have imagined, years ago, that we'd go to Giant Tiger and bring back not only the whole first season of Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, but also the entire run of Ray Bradbury Theater, for less than the cost of family movie tickets and in packages small enough to fit into a purse?  (Warning about the Ray Bradbury programs:  they are interesting stories with a great cast, but they are also capital-C Creepy, and they're full of unexpected twists, so please please please preview before watching with kids around.)

The Organized Kitchen: toaster ovens, leftovers, menu planning

Mama Squirrel likes any kitchen ideas that make life easier and give her more time to do important things. (Like play checkers with Crayons.) Here are a couple of squirrel kitchen tips.

1. We are a microwave-less family, not so much by principle as just by the fact that we've never owned one and have never felt we really needed one. What we've always had, though, besides the big oven, is a toaster oven. Originally we had one from Mama Squirrel's previous life (before squirrelings), but when that eventually went kaput we acquired a more modern programmable one. It actually looks (and beeps) like a microwave.

The advantages to having more than one source of oven heat are that you can bake two things at different temperatures if you need to (like baked beans at 350 degrees and a pan of biscuits at 450), and that you don't have to heat up the big oven if you're cooking a small amount of something. We have a lidded casserole that just fits into the toaster oven space, and we've also baked many things in it in an 8-inch square pan. About the only things we haven't baked in it are cookies (our pans are too big), muffins (although I do bake muffin batter in it, in an 8-inch pan), and any recipe big enough to need one of our plus-size casseroles.

And it also makes toast.

2. Menu Planning: Mama Squirrel's current binge of planned-ahead meals is in its third week, and she's discovered something that makes this planning easier. The Squirrels always shop on Saturdays (and it's not usually possible to make another trip during the week). This means that certain foods are more plentiful, say, from Saturday to Wednesday. By Wednesday, the bananas are gone, the cold cuts are eaten up, and so on. So: our week's menu starts on Wednesday, rather than on the more obvious Saturday. I can plan the meals from Wednesday to Friday based on what's still left in the fridge and the cupboard, and make sure that anything we need for the after-shopping days on goes on the grocery list. If I want to make banana muffins, I write them in for sometime after Saturday, and make sure I buy bananas.

Of course this does mess up the lovely menu forms that you can print out online (nobody's menu form starts on Wednesday), but still it's working.

3. Favourite kitchen tools: a four-cup glass measuring cup (you can mix all kinds of things right in it), sharp scissors (for cutting open those irritating, harder-than-ever-to-open cereal box liners), clothes pins (for pinning all the opened bags back together again), lots of measuring spoons (check thrift shops), a rubber spatula, and a decent can opener. Mama Squirrel has had better luck with the first few than with that last one. Cheap can openers rust and bend, and even the expensive one we once bought doesn't cut the way it used to. Inventors of kitchen improvements: there is a niche there that needs to be filled.

Oh, and a permanent marker. You need one handy if you're going to be putting leftovers in margarine tubs or other non-see-through containers. There's nothing like opening a container of yogurt and getting diced tomatoes instead..

On seeing how the "other half" grocery shops

After those posts about poverty (and not feeling particularly hard done by), Mama Squirrel had the interesting experience last weekend of doing the grocery shopping at a "regular grocery store," instead of the discount supermarket where the Squirrels buy most of their store-brand acorns.  At the discount supermarket, adding a frozen pizza and some ice cream to the cart is not much of a stretch; but we were walking through the land of "real prices"--and you know what, if I had to shop there every week I would start to feel poor. (Isn't that funny? Some people would feel "poor" shopping at the discount place because it's not so fancy.) It means something to have access to very reasonably-priced groceries instead of being held hostage to two-dollar-plus canned goods vs. eighty-nine cent ones.
So don't get me wrong: "scratch week" (because we didn't get our usual convenience foods) was not really anything to complain about. It was a good week to do some baking (because we didn't buy cookies) and to make homemade macaroni and cheese, and a batch of pancake syrup, and a batch of the bran muffins that Mama Squirrel discovered recently and that the squirrelings think are as good as the coffee-shop type. And eat up the vegetables in the crisper drawer. UPDATED LINK 

And we've refilled our pantry and our freezer now, and we are thankful (on Thanksgiving weekend) to have access to good food, a big old Caprice that holds a large trunkload of groceries, and family to eat it with.